doodledee

Over the last month or so I've observed a spike in the number of spam messages I've been getting. It's still not that bad - maybe 1 or 2 a day - but even one is enough to bug me. And before anyone downshifts into one-upmanship mode, the 'junk' yahoo account I use to buy stuff online and to register at websites gets like 100 bulk messages a day. I'm sure tons of people get more than that, but I don't care. The lesson here is: never type your email address into any form on any website ever.

As the volume of spam goes up, I've been playing with Thunderbird's native junk mail filtering to see if it can automatically ID and trash unwanted messages. It seems to be working fine, but I've decided it's not the best solution for me. It works by marking the message as junk and either throwing it away or moving it to a special folder. Well I don't want to just blindly throw messages away, so I go with the other option and have it file them for review. But them I'm such a dork that I can't resist immediately checking to make sure it wasn't actually a 'real' message that got deleted by mistake. So basically it gets me nowhere. Stupes.

I've decided that if it gets worse over the next few months I'll just go ahead and set-up some sort of server side protection. Probably with a whitelist and a challenge/response system backed by TMDA. (The lesson here is: I have way too much pent-up geek energy.) It'll be slick. If you're on my 'whitelist' - as opposed to my blacklist or my shitlist - I'll get your mail just fine. If you're not, my server will send you a message back asking to confirm your identity. Once you do, I'll see your original message and you'll automatically be cleared to send me stuff in the future. The idea is that spammers don't use valid 'reply-to' addresses, so they'd never get the 'challenge' bounce-back and therefore I'd never see their message. Bingo bango bongo.

I kinda wonder if Google isn't building some sort of gigantic whitelist for their Gmail system. For now, the only way to get a Gmail account is to be 'invited' by someone who already has one. When you invite them, you have to type in their email address to send them the invite. You get a couple million people sending out invites, suddenly you've got a whole lotta 'real' email addresses on file. And there's the start of your uber-list.

Sneaky those Google developers are, yes.